Teaching Resource

This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Through this step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any primary or secondary source material.

Over the course of four lessons, students will compare and contrast the dangers of the American West in the mid-to-late nineteenth century as described in the short story “To...